Why were most of the framers opposed to choosing the president by popular vote? by congress?

As prescribed in the U.S. Constitution, American presidents are elected not directly by the people, but by the people’s electors.

The Electoral College was created by the framers of the U.S. Constitution as an alternative to electing the president by popular vote or by Congress. Each state elects the number of representatives to the Electoral College that is equal to its number of Senators—two from each state—plus its number of delegates in the House of Representatives. The District of Columbia, which has no voting representation in Congress, has three Electoral College votes. There are currently 538 electors in the Electoral College; 270 votes are needed to win the presidential election.

Several weeks after the general election, electors from each state meet in their state capitals and cast their official vote for president and vice president. The votes are then sent to the president of the U.S. Senate who, on January 6 with the entire Congress present, tallies the votes and announces the winner.

The winner of the Electoral College vote is usually the candidate who has won the popular vote. However, it is possible to win the presidency without winning the popular vote. There have been a total of five candidates who have won the popular vote but lost in the Electoral College, with the most recent cases occurring in the 2016 and 2000 elections. Two other presidents—Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876 and Benjamin Harrison in 1888—became president without winning the popular vote. In the 1824 election between John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, Jackson won the popular vote but neither won a majority of Electoral College votes. Adams secured the presidency only after the election was decided by vote of the House of Representatives, a procedure provided for in the Constitution when no candidate wins a majority of the Electoral College.

The Electoral College is not a place, it’s the process that takes place to election the President of the United States. The founding fathers established it in the Constitution. This video explains the process and what it is designed to achieve: